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Estate Sale Prospecting for Fun and Profit with craigslist and eBay
vBulletin Book Store > vBulletin books beginning with E
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Estate Sale Prospecting for Fun and Profit with craigslist and eBay |
Author: John Landahl
Published: 2006-10-29 |
List price: $19.95
Our price: $14.96
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: September 06th, 2008 08:45:28 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 More like a long pamphlet than a book
I enjoyed the antecdotal bits dealing with the author's 'finds' and how he was able to turn them into profit on eBay. Plus it was helpful to hear his experiences on what didn't work.
HOWEVER - for upwards of $19 (incl shipping), this book simply does not offer the value to match it's pricetag. I was hoping for much more information/experiences about the culture of yard/estate/garage sales. Something perhaps like the highlights of a journal he created to chronicle his experiences at these events.
There just simply wasn't enough meat on these bones and I did not come away with any new insights, really.
Plus there were some pretty egregious problems with the editing.
If the cost was in the less then $10 range, I'd say okay. But you can go out and buy a "Dummies" book (unfortunately, not specifically on this topic that I know of) and see easily tenfold the content.
 How to find treasures and resell them online
I sell books for a living, and get quite a few of them at estate sales. Something I've never gotten around to is trying to buy some of the other knick-knacks you see at sales and reselling them on eBay. One of my favorite TV shows is Antiques Roadshow, but I've always stuck with books when it comes to my Internet business. After reading this book, perhaps I'll reconsider.
"Estate Sale Prospecting for Fun and Profit with craigslist and eBay" is a nice, easy-to-read book about how to get started selling obscure but valuable items bought at estate sales.
The idea behind the book is that two key tools have made it easier than ever to be a successful estate sale "prospector." First, craigslist, a free online classified service, allows you to quickly find all the upcoming sales in your region. And, of course, eBay enables you to put your items up for auction before a worldwide pool of buyers. The advice in this book helps you develop a system for buying a few inexpensive items at each estate sale for reselling profitably on eBay. And in that sense, it's just like bookselling -- you get better with experience. And you're not going to get rich, but you'll probably have some fun.
The author, John Landahl, got into online selling when he was cleaning out a closet and found a box of old marbles, which he nearly threw in the garbage. Instead he listed the marbles on eBay, where they sold for $94, and a new hobby was born. Landahl gives many more examples of successes and mistakes he's made along the way.
If you're interested in estate sale prospecting as a hobby or a business, I recommend this book.
 Some useful tips for raw beginners.
`Estate Sale Prospecting for Fun and Profit with craigslist and eBay' by John Landahl is a self-published (vanity press published) book on how to use these two Internet resources to come out ahead with buying and selling things purchased at estate sales. Since I reviewed `The Home-Based Bookstore' is written by Steve Weber, Mr. Landahl, like Mr. Weber, solicited this review from me and provided me with a copy of his book free of charge.
One thing that may be confusing is the meaning of `Estate Sales'. It does not mean, and this book does not deal with the buying and selling of Real Estate! Estate Sales are a very special kind of tag sale where the entire contents of a person's estate are put up for sale, generally on the premises of the probably deceased individual's property. The big difference between Estate Sales and `yard sales' is that while at the latter, people are largely selling off their white elephants and at the former, an agent is selling EVERYTHING which a person owned. This means that Estate Sales are far more likely to include things of real value. But, that doesn't mean the advice in this book is not relevant to things acquired at garage sales, flea markets, church bazaars, or second hand shops. I only know from long experience with a very large annual `white elephant' sale that the chance of finding good stuff at such sales is small, and it is much more to expect to have fun than to acquire lucre from these venues.
In rating Mr. Landahl's book, I am being generous with four stars because the author is quite realistic about the pitfalls and the fact that success is not guaranteed. Coming out with more money you invest requires a lot of work and attention to detail. I am not giving him five stars because even though I am not an expert in this subject, I believe Mr. Landahl left out some important advice which would have bulked up this slim volume and made it more valuable than the run of the mill `dummy' manual.
Regarding the book's design features, I think it suffers from a too cluttered table of contents and a lack of an index. The latter omission is not fatal in a small book, but it does not bode well. The former issue is clearly a problem when you look over the chapter titles, and see the same subjects coming up again and again in non-contiguous chapter titles. `Selling on eBay' appears in the titles of four different non-contiguous chapters. I thing a single chapter covering these four topics is subsidiary sections may have been better. This organization leads to an annoying tendency we often see on CNN and other longish news shows where we get teasers about upcoming segments that may be anywhere from 10 minutes to five days away! I often sit and wait for some of these promoted items and they don't come up as promised. Mr. Landahl certainly delivers everything he promises, but the writing style has noisome associations. I suspect that Mr. Landahl would have done much better with only five or six main chapters in a book of less than 95 pages.
I applaud Mr. Landahl's citing the large number of books available on how to make the best of eBay, since these books are probably in direct competition with his own work! But as long as you are doing this, why not go the next step and include a bibliography of these book titles, beginning with the very nice work by Mr. Weber, cited above. I'm also just a bit surprised that he limits himself to craigslist and eBay (with an appendectical reference to Amazon). I have a hunch that there are dozens of other sources of bargains, from government auctions to Christie's to Sotheby's to local auctioneers. And, there may be other rich sources for tracking things down such as the Internet classifieds done by local newspapers.
One point, I think Mr. Landahl could have done much better for us. He makes no mention at all of the dozens of sources for prices for everything from glass to toys to comic books to baseball cards to Beanie Babies. I'm sure eBay will be more up to date on most of these things, but unless you are really at the high end of technology, it's unlikely you will be able to carry around a handheld device with a live connection to eBay while you are at a flea market out in the middle of darkest Bucks county (PA).
It's possible I'm taking the subject much further afield than Mr. Landahl wishes to go, but I think some of these notions may have value if he finds himself doing a revised edition.
One thing I really liked about the book was the baseball analogy, where one thinks of rate of sales as one's batting average. My only suggestion here is that even the very best batters only have an average of .35, and I think one will want to do a lot better than `breaking even'. I might suggest that purchases and sales might be compared to playing poker. One looses most of the pots, but you win big on a few, so that if you play well, you come out ahead in the long run. I would also suggest that if you are in this more for the profit than for the fun, you also make out a business plan and invest in a bit of simple accounting software to keep track of overall sales and expenses, even if you never apply for a bank loan. Also, I'm just a bit surprised that the author makes no mention of sales taxes (unless I missed it).
A worthy effort by an amateur book `publisher' and author.
A good place to start if your are thinking about selling on e-Bay as a hobby or business
One of the things I have learned while working for myself is that most people harbor a dream of working on their own. They don't know how hard and difficult it is in reality, but they know that they like the regular paycheck and security (however illusory) of having a place to go everyday. Those for whom the dream becomes a need begin looking for side businesses they can do as a hobby or something a bit more. This book is a good beginner's guide for those who love to shop for real buys at estate sales and yard sales. Beginning with this information, including the author's well expressed cautions, these folks can begin to turn what they enjoy into some extra cash.
John Landahl shares what he has learned from his own experience about how to get started in this. He tells you how to use craigslist to find likely sale events (and to dump items that didn't sell on e-Bay) and how to conduct yourself while looking for good things to resell. Probably the best part of the book is when he shares examples of what worked for him and what did NOT work. He even includes some photographs of those items. The cautions, if heeded, can save you lots of time and money.
He shares with the reader how to get into this hobby / business without too much upfront cost, what you will need to do it right, and what is overkill. One of the things most people find when they get into business is that what they thought would work usually doesn't. Landahl tries to save you some time without having to learn these for yourself.
Towards the end he explains the business in terms of baseball. It is a terrific metaphor and helped me to understand what the experience is likely to be. Things won't be sunny and perfect in any business, but each has its own pattern of challenges and opportunites.
The author does share with us that there are hundreds of books on how to learn the mechanics of e-Bay and that this isn't the purpose of his book, and I agree that this would have consumed too much time away from his topic. However, I wished that he had shared a few likely titles. Maybe he avoided that because they are continually coming on the market and didn't want to list something that would be too soon outdated.
If you are thinking about selling on e-Bay for fun or as a business, this is a pretty darn good place to start.
A really useful handbook
Like a lot of people these days, I'm a regular eBayer- it's a great way to clean out the basement and pick up a few $$$ for the toy account while you're at it. And like a lot of people, I can't pass up a good estate sale. I'm always looking for a deal. So of course when I was given a chace to review this book, it seemed like a natural.
What Landahl has writtten is a short, but very useful how-to that guides the absolute beginner through both finding goods to resale, and the best way to sell them on eBay, Craigslist and other outlets. He's got a lot of great tips and specifics that go beyond the mchanics of posting and selling. Lendahl gives you strategies for setting prices, posting photos, writing titles, and making your sales look as attrative as possible. He even covers details like the best source for inexpensive scales to determine shipping costs.
There are chapters on how to find good estate sales, how to identify good merchandise, examples of good and bad finds, maintaining a good rating, and what kinds of books to buy- and what kinds of books not to buy.
This book alone won't make you a successful estate sale prospector- you still need the drive to shop those sales and maintain your eBay sales. Not everyone can do that. But if you're motivated, and looking for a good source of additional income, Lendahl's book is a very good place to start.
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